Forget everything you’ve heard and read about education. There’s a new paradigm, and it’s called Teaching Advanced Literacy Skills. This is revolutionary, of course, because it appears clear to the authors that no English teacher in the history of the universe has ever taught advanced literacy. Also, since no one in the world will ever go into a trade, and since everyone will spend their entire lives doing academic writing, we need to start work on this right away.

No, evidently we just do the whole phonics thing, and once students are able to sound out words, we give up on them for the next eleven years or so and hope for the best. Thank goodness these brilliant writers are here to let us know that students need to be able to identify a main idea, and that this indispensable skill is actually an amalgam of other vital skills.

Not only that, but we now know that it’s important students use a variety of sources to support their arguments, as opposed to just making stuff up (like the President of the United States, for example). That’s why we, as teachers, should hand them several sources on which to base their writing, as do the geniuses in Albany when they issue the NY State ELA Regents, the final word on whether or not students have advanced literacy.

Never mind that students who’ve passed the test with high grades don’t seem to know how to read or write well. Never mind nonsense like writer voice, mentioned absolutely nowhere in the book. Never mind whether or not anyone actually wishes to read whatever writing the students produce, because that’s also mentioned absolutely nowhere in the book. The important thing is that they be able to produce academic writing. Do you go out of your way to read academic writing? Neither do I.

The book is big on synthesis, that is, using multiple sources. Like the awful English Regents exam, students are generally provided with sources. I suppose this is some sort of training to write research papers. Here’s the thing, though–if you write research papers you will have to find your own sources. I recall being in summer classes at Queens College, in their old crappy library searching through shelves with a flashlight trying to find things to write about. No such issue for our advanced literacy-trained students. Here are texts a, b, c and d. Get out there and tell me which ones are better.

We don’t need to teach students about logical fallacy either, which is good news for politicians everywhere. Students need not recognize ad hominem or straw man arguments. No guilt by association for you. We don’t need to bother showing them why some arguments are less logical than others, as per this book at least. I suppose when Donald Trump calls whatever doesn’t suit him “fake news,” that’s okay. It’s just another academic source.

One of the most fascinating aspects of this book, to me, is that the project they spend the most time on is one in which students discuss whether or not their school should adopt uniforms. I wrote in the margins, “great topic,” Why? Because this was a topic that had a direct effect on their lives. This decision would change their behavior, and perhaps change their entire school. There was an intrinsic motivation for students to be involved in this decision.

Nowhere in the book did the writers deem this worthy of mention. I have no idea whether or not they even noticed it. I did, though, and it was hands down a better topic than some of the crap students must wade through on the English Regents exam. Don’t get me wrong–I understand that students, like us, will have to wade through a lot of crap in their academic lives. To me, though, it seems smarter to make them love reading. It seems smarter to motivate them to do so on their own. Then, when they have to read some crap to which they cannot relate, they’ll be better equipped to do so, having developed the skills this book advocates in a far more positive fashion.

One thing that makes me love writers is something called writer voice. A great example of this is Angela’s Ashes, a non-fiction work (!) by the late and brilliant Frank McCourt. They made a film out of it which faithfully told the story, but was total crap. That’s because the allure and charm of this story was all about the way McCourt told it, his humor, his deft and inspiring use of language. He had me at the first sentence about childhood, and kept me hypnotized until the last sentence. I couldn’t put the book down.

Why should students today have the same pleasure? Why do experienced teachers know about teaching anyway? Nothing, by the lights of the bureaucrats in Albany.

thirty years teaching children grades 7 to 12 how to write, but not with any focus on academic writing. Academic writing is often extremely boring, put you to sleep snore time and is as confusing, if not worse, as what lawyers write when it comes to law.

four published award-winning books

In other words, what total moron, bobby, buffoon, fool, loony, lunatic, madman, nut, loser, featherbrained idiot came up with this idea?

I thought it would be almost impossible for someone to outdo Trump.

HUH!?!?!?!?!

What is worse than dumb is dumber?

I taught English for thirty years from middle school to high school for the last 16.

If all these people with time on their hands in upper administrative positions in state departments were not there, would we get these great revelations handed down from each private Patmos yearning to reach the teeming masses with brilliance?

No.

These things are produced from the pens of those who have no real purpose, but have to justify their lucrative positions with something that looks like a good job. I have seen college professors in the same place. Without students to teach, or that they want to teach, they loose upon the unsuspecting world some ridiculous idea that serves only to cause chatter.

I certainly think that we need thinkers in society. It is even good to have some people around that criticize and suggest. But the wind that blows from state departments of education often blows no good.

While I am unfamiliar with the book in question, I did look up the authors. All three are young, Harvard educated academics. It is likely these three had very little practical experience with education other than being a student themselves prior to so-called reform. They have a background in reading research and linguistics but very little direct experience with diverse learners. Thus, they are perpetuating the data mongering and non-fiction preoccupation of deform as this is familiar territory for them. I would be interested in knowing what some of the experts in second language acquisition think about the book.

“When You Get That Wealthy, You Start to Buy Your Own Bullshit”: The Miseducation of Sheryl Sandberg

Harvard Business School invented the “leadership” industry—and produced a generation of corporate monsters. No wonder Sandberg, one of the school’s most prominent graduates, lacks a functioning moral compass.

This nonsense comes down to us teachers who know nothing from Angelica Infante-Green. Infante-Green can bestow her opinions on real teachers because, after all, she cut her teeth on TFA, taught for a few minutes, and is a member of Chiefs for Change. Infante Green ran quickly through the ranks in NYC DOE, moved on to the New York State DOE where she spearheaded the drive to cut direct English Language Instruction for ELLS, and is now Rhode Island’s Commissioner of Education. Infante-Green is passionate about English Language Learners because she was one. This makes her an expert. Infante-Green bestowed her “passion” on Nonie K. Lesaux, a Harvard professor of education who is one of the authors of the book.

Any administrator who is a “chief for change” should be avoided at all costs. New Yorkers should echew Infante-Green’s involvement with their schools and/or policies. New York does not need this type of top down dictatorship that is misguided and often dead wrong for public schools and students. Real, meaningful change is generally bottom up and evolutionary.

The biggest clue that David Coleman didn’t have a freaking clue what he was doing should have been that he treated a) reading substantive works of literature and b) reading closely/carefully as freaking revelations. Oh, gosh, David. No one would ever have thought of asking kids to do those things without your Earth-shattering message!

Gates and Achieve appointed this guy to be High Sheriff of English Language Arts and Mathematics instruction in the US based on what? Here was a fellow so clueless that he discounted the value of narrative writing, even though narrative is key to being human.

Coleman didn’t even understand that in ELA, there has LONG been a pretty much de facto standard reading list of substantive classics found in every freaking literature textbook program.

He didn’t even know that almost all high schools in the United States taught an American lit survey course in Grade 11 and a Brit Lit survey course in Grade 12. So, in his backward, regressive, idiotic, mediocre, pedestrian “standards,” he called for study of “foundational works of American literature” in Grades 11 and 12, effectively throwing a monkey wrench into the standard ELA curriculum progression.

The result of the Gates/Coleman list has been curricula that are trivial and incoherent–random exercises to “practice” skills from the dumb bullet list on random snippets of text.

Enough of the top-down specification of curricula and pedagogy by know-nothings.

And why? Why Coleman? Well, Gates wanted a single national bullet list to key depersonalized education software and stack ranking databases to, and Coleman happened to present himself. It didn’t matter to Gates. Any stupid list would do.

The biggest scandal of all this is that Gates and Coleman should have been laughed off the national stage decades ago, when they first put this uninformed _______ forward.

“he called for study of “foundational works of American literature” in Grades 11 and 12, effectively throwing a monkey wrench into the standard ELA curriculum progression.” Interesting, I hadn’t caught that before. So did this effectively delete Brit Lit from 12th? Back in my day [mid-’60’s hisch], we’d been scaffolding Amer Lit since 7th-gr– interspersed w/a bit of Shakespeare, & some Russian short stories– culminating in more modern Amer works in 11th-gr, then intensive BritLit [from Beowulf thro 19thC classics] in 12th. So all that changed?

I’m wondering if BritLit was already on the wane before Coleman. Remembering that my millennial sons’ [hisch early-mid-2000’s] sr yr reading incl Pearl Buck & Steinback (among classics) & modern Amer works e.g. “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” I don’t remember them assaying anything like Austen or Eliot, which I remember reading in 12thgr.

bethree: some schools had replaced the Brit Lit survey with a world lit one, but the Brit Lit survey was still, by FAR, the most common in Grade 12 in US schools. Many schools followed the Texas model of having a world lit survey in Grade 10. All one has to do to confirm this is to look at the sales of basal literature textbooks in the US. Standard–World Lit, grade 10, American Lit, grade 11, and Brit Lit, grade 12. The American Lit survey was taken at the same time that Juniors in most schools were doing an American history survey. In response to Coleman’s bullet list, laughably described as “higher standards,” most of the basal lit publishers threw some American lit selections into their Grade 12 textbook. So, somewhere between Beowulf and Chaucer, a couple paragraphs from the Declaration of Independence. Does that make sense? No, but here we are. Thanks, Lord Coleman.

To accommodate those states that had World Lit in Grade 12, most publishers of basal literature programs, pre-Coleman, had two versions of their Grade 12 book, one a Brit Lit survey, the other a World Lit survey, with some Brit Lit in it.

There just is not time for “world” literature. How do we decide what is most important for the kids to experience? Yes, we have deep European roots, but should we ignore African, Latino, and Asian writers given the diversity of our own population? I don’t have the answers; the same sorts of questions must resonate with the social studies professions. Even covering our own history is becoming increasingly difficult. I remember teachers struggling to get through the Vietnam war and the Civil Rights movement before the end of eighth grade. Eighth grade started with an extensive study of the Constitution. If that is still true in my district, this year’s eighth graders probably are getting or got a real lesson in how it is supposed to work. The challenge to teachers has got to be keeping individual politics (and, in particular, theirs) out of the dialogue. I would have loved to sit in on the department discussions.

He was at Oxford, then at Cambridge, where he took a MA in Philosophy with a concentration on classical philosophy and, in particular, Aristotle. Like Aristotle, Coleman felt himself confident to expound upon and lecture to others about subjects about which he knew nothing. This his misadventure into mansplaining to English teachers what they must be doing in their classrooms, which is like Aristotle, who claimed that men had more teeth than do women, something he could have easily disproved by actually looking at the teeth of young, healthy men and women. Coleman could have easily disproved his own thesis that English teachers weren’t teaching substantive works of literature by looking at the standard literature anthologies and his thesis that they weren’t having kids read closely by looking at the exercises and activities in those anthologies. Every work in them is typically followed by a series of questions that takes the student through just such a step-by-step close reading. Coleman’s lecturing English teachers about how to teach English is like me deciding to lecture basketball coaches about dribbling. I know nothing of dribbling or of basketball. I guess that if I did, I would be qualified, like Arne Duncan, to be Secretary of Education.

Correction: At the time Gates and Coleman issued their laughable “standards,” the basal literature anthologies all did that. No more. They have devolved since the CC$$, and for the most part, the series of close reading questions that had always been standard after each selection in these anthologies is gone. There is a vast gulf between what proponents of the CC$$ think they are doing and what consequences their disruption has actually had for curricula and pedagogy.

These stupid high-stakes standardized tests in ELA, when they do contain writing, encourage formulaic writing of the puerile five-paragraph theme variety.

Catchy intro, ending with the thesis statement, which answers the question or addresses the issue in the writing prompt.

Three paragraphs, each beginning with a topic sentence that supports the thesis and containing evidence supporting the topic sentence.

A conclusion that restates the thesis in different words and contains a call to action.

Transitions throughout the tie the ideas together. Definitions of key terms. Formal language.

There. A formula. One of Gates’s computers or even a New York Regent could write one of these. You can probably train your hamster to do it.

One problem though: NO ONE WRITES LIKE THIS EXCEPT FOR ENGLISH TEACHERS AND TEST MAKERS WHO EXPECT THEM TO DO SO. College professor HATE THIS CRAP. They are sick to death of it and try to teach kids not to write in this ridiculous, formulaic way.

But the formula is perfect for E-grading.

I love to dream about Rumi or Blake or e.e. cummings writing a response to one of these stupid state test writing prompts.

My suggestion to students: Instead of writing the essay, write: “My mind is not standardized enough to formulate the expected response. Sorry.”

cx of the cx: EXCEPT WHEN ENGLISH TEACHERS AND TEST MAKERS EXPECT THEM TO DO SO

Sorry, these stupid mandates from state departments make me so furious that I can barely write standard English in response to them. The actual language I would like to use in response isn’t appropriate for a public forum like Diane’s blog.

Preparing students for bubble tests is like training seals. Ten, fifteen years ago we taught writing K-12. Today it seems to be a lost art. I can remember reading some original, creative stories from mainstream 4th graders that were three or four well written pages long.

But that’s fine with Gates, Coleman, the Deformers at Harvard and Arizona, etc. GOOD ENOUGH FOR PROLE CHILDREN. Their own children will go to schools where real writing is done and real teachers read that writing. Prole children will learn to write to formula and to be graded by algorithm. Perfect training for being servile bots in the 21st century workplace.

The first thing my son’s 9th grade English teacher said to them was that he knew they all were proficient at five-paragraph essays, but that now they were going to learn how to write and they did. Five paragraph essays were yet to be in vogue when I was in school. As a result, my papers often had these cryptic, to me, comments about adding more detail. I could have used a scaffold. I always wrote my formal outlines after I wrote a paper if they were required. All I knew was if you had an A you had to have a B, etc. I found it much easier to identify that structure after I had written the paper. No one ever explained the idea of supporting details. So, while I understand the derision extended toward the format, I found it a handy place to start teaching certain types of writing with my special ed students. The same holds true for the graphic most people have probably seen for narrative writing that looks like a normal curve. It was a useful tool for describing a simple narrative structure.

You are talking about the Freytag pyramid for narrative structure. (It’s usually presented not as a curve but as a pyramid.)

More valuable, I think, is teaching kids–presenting them with models and having them copy these–of lots and lots and lots of ways in which ideas,, first in individual sentences, and then in separate paragraphs, can be connected to one another (addition, disjunction, negation, generalization, specific example, illustrative anecdote, and so on–one can make a long list). And, ofc, teaching a handful of tricks for openings and closings.

Ah, yes. Now I remember. The peak was the climax. It was very useful to my students. Visual models helped them to internalize basic ideas. I use to sit in on 7-8 grade language arts classes that did a lot of what you were suggesting. I found it quite interesting and very different from the way I had been taught and very valuable to my own teaching. Those teachers were very generous with their ideas and materials. I don’t know how else I could have successfully taught those students who could not handle the mainstream classes.

Give students clear models and analyze them to discover their essential, defining elements
Use those elements, to the extent possible, as a specification for the writing to be done–these are the parts, in this order
But specific to the type of writing. A news story is not a eulogy is not a fable is not a lyric poem is not an abstract of a scientific paper is not a thank you note. The 5-paragraph theme formula, like the formula for the standard paragraph, is almost nowhere to be found in the real world. Concentrating on this does kids a great disservice. It’s like saying that one has studied the Civil War but only studying the differences between Rebel and Union cannonballs. Or its like polishing the bright work on a sailboat when there is a hole in the hull. Really bad pedagogy, but encouraged by David Coleman’s ridiculous, backward “standards.”

What Bob suggests resembles the way I was taught writing back in the day [K12 ’50’s-’60’s], starting in 7thgr & repeated ad naus, advancing eventually by 12thgr to term papers. We were taught all different ways. The newspaper article. Persuasive writing. Expository writing – similar to the 3-para and 5-para essays, but not so formulaic. Creative writing. And more. I believe I remember even something called “scientific writing.”

I agree w/you, there’s a bonus to the formulaic essay as taught today, i.e. they clue you in on where you need to be inserting back-up to support your thesis. That helped my [millennial] kids too. But I think that need for an essay “formula” reflects badly on poor pedagogy/ lack of proper writing instruction curriculum. It’s why we started w/ “the newspaper article” back in the day: you learned right off the bat to back up your opening para in subsequent paras w/increasing supporting detail.

Today’s exclusive focus on the brief expository essay seems to go hand in hand w/CCSS focus on non-fiction excerpts. It’s peddled as de rigueur for 21stC application, but smells more like computer-gradable. It goes w/less time to teach writing because, too many kids/ not enough time to correct pprs/ too much time spent on test-prepping.

I totally agree that the formulaic must be followed by application of principles to different forms of writing. You were lucky in your writing experience. I graduated high school in ’68 and have no memory of the extensive writing program you suggest. High school was literary critique and research papers. I only remember book reports from younger years, so I’m guessing the writing instruction was not inspired. I loved shadowing the middle school/jr high classes as a special ed teacher because of the variety of writing modeled and attempted.

You’re right, speduktr, I was lucky – used to think everybody [at least in NYS] was taught as I was, but have realized over the yrs: it was a collegetown, ed was paramount to voters; they never turned down a budget in the ‘60’s. Also there were some unusual teachers, esp in jrhi – teaching while getting a PhD or filling out a PT college instruction schedule. I learned all about Lat & Gr word-roots from my 7th gr Eng teacher. I had a Soc Stud teacher who had us study a spectrum of political periodicals to understand liberal & conservative editorial position. My first French teacher later headed the hisch lang dept, & by the time I got to college, was my Adv French Comp & Grammar prof. Another thing that reflects is the flexibility & professionalism allowed teachers back then, so you could actually take advantage of a regional strength like that. I suspect things are very different there now thanks to fed & state mandates.

Now here’s a guy who has a voice and knows for whom he is writing. And, bonus: Arthur Goldstein is hilarious! A sample of my faves:

“The important thing is that [students] be able to produce academic writing. Do you go out of your way to read academic writing? Neither do I.”
“We don’t need to teach students about logical fallacy either, which is good news for politicians everywhere.”
“I’m certain any of the authors could write a term paper; indeed I wouldn’t be surprised if they spent all their spare time doing so.”

The authors of this book do seem to understand that standardized test results (especially in ELA) should not be used to guide instructional planning for individual students. And they seem to understand that development of robust syntactic fluency based on the ambient SPOKEN linguistic environment is a key to learning to read.

They don’t seem to grok that high-stakes standardized testing is basically useless, that the whole data-based model is wrong from the start (garbage in, garbage out), or that there should be a moratorium on the use in education of the term “skills,” which just leads to vagueness and pushes out curricula and pedagogy founded on conveying knowledge. If “educators” used “procedural knowledge” instead of skills, they wouldn’t talk airy nothings as much as they do.

I’m sorry, Bob. I am still struggling with “grok.” I don’t remember ever seeing it except in your blog posts. Please use it more frequently, so I don’t have to look it up each time you use it! I know I could start using it myself, but I’m afraid most people would think I had a frog in my throat! 🙂

From Robert Heinlein’s novel Stranger in a Strange Land. It means to understand something deeply, viscerally. The term was very common in the hippie days, and sci fi enthusiasts will know it. Grok, btw, is the only English word in common use that is derived from Martian. LOL.

After I responded to you, I asked my husband if he knew the word, “grok.” He did, and was able to define it and identify its source. He trained as a civil engineer and, for a long time, was not what you would call a fan of liberal arts, so I was humbled by his knowledge. Can’t judge an engineer by his cover. 🙂

Full disclosure: I have to blush in recognition at “I’m certain any of the authors could write a term paper; indeed I wouldn’t be surprised if they spent all their spare time doing so.” I have long led my book club’s annual “poetry session” – just a week ago: a seminar in the difficulties of translating modern European poetry (triggered by reading Burnshaw’s “The Poem Itself”– thanks, Bob Shepherd!). But but but: it was all about the audience [who actively & happily participated]. It’s a group which started as mostly ex-pats when I joined it 25 yrs ago, & still has enough polyglots to read aloud in Fr, Sp, Ital & Ger. And we’re composed of mostly non-ELA types eager for background in lit.

I am just a wannabe who loves sharing my interests w/like-aged adults. Am also a teacher of [Spanish] to the very young, & Mom to millennials who are just starting to dig deeper into lit & [gasp] share some of Ma’s books. Would never dream of imposing “academic writing” on high schoolers. What one should be doing at that age is continuing the since-K effort to engender love of reading, & teaching how to pursue their own interests more deeply, & write about that.

P.S… The idea of “academic writing” promoted by scholars who have the ear of NYS Regents seems a little silly, since those same regents are doubled down on stds/aligned assessments accountability system, which barely leaves any room in the curriculum forwriting instruction period.

And every real learner knows himself or herself to be a wannabe. Art is long, life short.

It’s the wannabe that we need to learn not to kill in our students. The Regents seem intent on doing precisely that–killing the intrinsic love of learning in the name of milling 21st-century worker bots who can write that summary of the marketing survey and will never dream of wondering whether the survey was flawed or whether this crap ought to be marketed at all.